Who is buying startups on TrustMRR?

Can we actually tell who is buying startups on TrustMRR?

We cannot see every TrustMRR buyer today, because the marketplace deliberately keeps many acquisitions anonymous.

TrustMRR’s FAQ says a completed deal is publicly identified only when both the buyer and seller agree to the announcement. If either side declines, TrustMRR can still publish the price, revenue and type of business while hiding the startup and the people involved. That is exactly what happens in its weekly acquisition feed: many entries look like “AI health tool making $500/mo, acquired for $5,000” with no buyer attached.

This creates an obvious research problem. TrustMRR currently shows 156 completed acquisitions, while only a much smaller group of buyers can be identified publicly. So we cannot honestly claim to have a demographic breakdown of every TrustMRR acquirer.

We can still get surprisingly close to the answer. The named acquisitions tell us what actual buyers look like, while the prices, revenue levels and types of businesses being sold tell us who could realistically be buying the anonymous ones. Both point in roughly the same direction.

How big is the TrustMRR buyer pool today?

TrustMRR has a lot of people looking at startups, but only a tiny share have actually completed an acquisition.

Marc Lou recently said TrustMRR had reached 30,000 buyers. The marketplace itself currently says around 200,000 people visit each month and offers more than 2,000 businesses for sale. Those are meaningful numbers for a marketplace that only started operating recently.

But “30,000 buyers” clearly should not be read as 30,000 people who have bought a company. TrustMRR currently reports 156 completed acquisitions. Even if every transaction involved a different buyer, completed acquirers would represent well under 1% of that stated buyer pool.

So there are really several groups mixed together: people casually browsing, founders checking valuations, buyers waiting for the right opportunity, people sending offers, and the much smaller group actually wiring money.

That distinction becomes important when trying to understand who really buys on TrustMRR. Website traffic tells us the marketplace has reach. Closed deals tell us who is willing to act.

Are TrustMRR startups mostly being bought by companies or individual entrepreneurs?

Individual entrepreneurs and small operators currently appear far more often than big companies in the TrustMRR deals where the buyer is public.

We looked for acquisitions where the buyer could actually be identified. The recurring profile was remarkably practical: SaaS founders, developers, e-commerce operators and people already running several small internet businesses.

The $63,000 DropPop acquisition is a good example. The buyer, Alex Birle, had more than ten years of e-commerce experience and wanted to move from consulting toward owning something he could scale. Directify sold for $85,000 to Venelin Kochev, an experienced developer and indie SaaS founder. Promptmonitor went to a buyer building a portfolio of SaaS products under Stackdirectory.

Rafal Zawadzki gives us an even clearer look at the buyer mindset. He already ran Supadata when he found RemoveBG API on TrustMRR. After buying it, he described the deal as his first acquisition and explained that his experience running another API business gave him ideas for growing the new one.

We found much less public evidence of large corporations buying TrustMRR startups through conventional M&A teams. That could happen privately, but the disclosed transactions currently look much more like entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur deals.

Who are the TrustMRR buyers we can actually identify?

The publicly named TrustMRR buyers mostly have operating experience that matches what they acquired.

The interesting part is the fit between buyer and asset. These people generally did not appear to be shopping randomly for yield. They bought businesses they could understand and, in several cases, businesses close to something they already knew how to run.

Buyer	Startup acquired	What we know about the buyer
Babakay / Stackdirectory	Promptmonitor, $85,000	Was building a small SaaS portfolio. Promptmonitor’s own privacy policy now identifies Stackdirectory LLC as the company behind the product.
Alex Birle	DropPop, $63,000	Had 10+ years of e-commerce experience and wanted to own an asset he could scale rather than stay focused on consulting.
Venelin Kochev	Directify, $85,000	Experienced developer and indie SaaS builder who was already operating software businesses.
Rafal Zawadzki	RemoveBG API	Already ran Supadata and specifically said his API experience gave him confidence and ideas for growing the acquisition.
Marc Lou	PayPing, $1,767	Experienced indie founder who bought a very small software product through his own marketplace.

Are SaaS portfolio owners becoming a real buyer group on TrustMRR?

Yes. Small SaaS portfolio owners look like one of the most natural buyer groups emerging on TrustMRR right now.

Promptmonitor makes the pattern easy to see. The business sold for $85,000 to Babakay, who was already building a collection of SaaS products through Stackdirectory. This was a portfolio acquisition rather than someone buying themselves a first job.

Rafal Zawadzki described his RemoveBG API purchase in similar language. He was “strategizing on my portfolio” when he found the product and saw another API business that fit what he already knew. He could reuse knowledge from Supadata instead of learning an unfamiliar market from scratch.

There is now even a small ecosystem forming around this behavior. Services such as DealMRR have appeared specifically to rank TrustMRR listings for buyers using price, growth, payback and data quality. Another recently launched product, The MRR Brief, publishes acquisition research aimed at TrustMRR buyers. Neither proves that professional roll-ups dominate the marketplace, but both show that people are starting to treat TrustMRR as a repeatable source of deal flow rather than somewhere they visit once.

For a small software portfolio, the economics can work at a scale where a traditional acquisition fund would barely bother opening the spreadsheet.

Do TrustMRR buyers usually buy startups in markets they already know?

Often, yes. Several of the clearest TrustMRR acquisitions happened because the buyer already understood the business better than a random investor would.

Alex Birle buying DropPop is almost a textbook example. DropPop automates work for sellers on platforms such as Depop, Vinted, Etsy and eBay. Birle came into the deal with more than a decade in e-commerce. He was buying something directly connected to his existing experience.

Rafal Zawadzki did something similar with RemoveBG API. He was already running Supadata, another API business, and publicly explained that this experience made the acquisition attractive. He was not starting with a blank sheet of paper after closing.

That changes how we should think about valuation on TrustMRR. A product can be worth considerably more to someone who already has distribution, technical knowledge or customers in the same market than it is to a passive financial buyer.

For sellers, the best buyer may simply be the person who immediately knows what to do with the business on Monday morning.

How much are TrustMRR buyers actually spending right now?

TrustMRR is still mostly a marketplace for small acquisitions, despite the occasional $60,000 to $85,000 exit that gets much more attention.

TrustMRR’s live seller page currently shows 156 acquisitions and about $995,000 of total acquisition volume. That works out to roughly $6,400 per completed acquisition across the marketplace.

The latest weekly acquisition feed shows how misleading even that average can be. Five businesses sold for $426, $1,000, $2,250, $5,000 and $24,000. The median was only $2,250. The $24,000 blogging-platform deal alone represented about 73% of all the money spent across those five transactions.

Recent acquisition	Sale price
Social media tracker	$426
B2B analytics tool	$1,000
Job alert service	$2,250
AI health tool	$5,000
Blogging platform	$24,000
Median	$2,250

So a typical TrustMRR buyer these days does not need a seven-figure acquisition budget. A developer with several thousand dollars in savings can participate in the same marketplace as someone looking for an $85,000 SaaS.

That radically widens the buyer pool.

What kind of startup actually gets bought on TrustMRR?

TrustMRR buyers are currently willing to buy very small, very young businesses, including products with almost no revenue.

Marc Lou published aggregated data after more than 100 TrustMRR acquisitions. The acquired startups were generating roughly $506 per month on average, were only 1.1 years old, had average profit margins of 68% and had grown 42% during the previous 30 days. Their average sale price was $7,600 at the time.

The marketplace’s acquisition feed shows how far down the revenue curve buyers are willing to go. TrustMRR has recorded a zero-revenue B2B AI startup selling for $3,500, a zero-revenue product selling for $1,600, a website-security tool making around $50 per month selling for $2,000, and a CV-analysis product making about $10 per month selling for $275.

The latest feed continues the same pattern. A B2B analytics product making roughly $5 per month sold for $1,000, while a social-media tracker making around $100 per month sold for $426.

These buyers clearly do not require years of financial statements before considering a deal. Code, users, domain authority, app-store presence, integrations, product polish and the time saved by acquiring something already working can all have value even when the P&L is tiny.

Are TrustMRR buyers mostly looking for AI startups?

AI gets the most attention on TrustMRR, but buyers are currently purchasing a much wider range of small internet businesses.

In Marc Lou’s dataset covering more than 100 acquisitions, AI was the most frequently acquired category. That fits the marketplace more broadly: a large share of TrustMRR’s fastest-growing and most visible businesses today are AI products.

The closed deals are much more diverse, though. Recent acquisitions include a blogging platform, job-alert service, social-media tracker, analytics product and AI health tool. Previous weeks included website-security software, a SaaS directory, creator products, travel tools, mobile apps and job boards.

So AI probably increases the odds that a listing gets attention these days, especially when the product sits inside a hot category. Buyers are still perfectly willing to purchase boring software when the numbers or the operating opportunity make sense.

A small job-alert product does not need an AI story if someone believes they can buy it cheaply and improve it.

What are TrustMRR buyers actually paying for?

TrustMRR buyers are often paying for a head start: some existing cash flow, a functioning product and an opportunity they think they can improve.

The importance of each part changes with the deal. A profitable SaaS with recurring customers can obviously be valued on earnings. At the very low end, however, paying $1,000 for a product making almost nothing each month cannot be explained by current cash flow alone.

For those acquisitions, the buyer may be getting months of development work, a domain, production infrastructure, payment integrations, users, SEO pages, an app-store listing, customer feedback and a product that has already survived contact with the market. Building the same thing from scratch might cost more in time than simply buying it.

Larger transactions bring more operating upside into the calculation. Directify had reached roughly $2,000 MRR before its $85,000 acquisition. Promptmonitor had established recurring revenue in a fast-growing AI-visibility market before selling for the same amount. DropPop went to an e-commerce specialist who could apply years of experience to the product.

The common thread is simple: the buyer sees a faster route from the current business to something better.

Why are TrustMRR acquisitions accessible to so many individual buyers?

Low prices and a simple asset-transfer process make TrustMRR acquisitions possible without an M&A department.

TrustMRR currently reports an average acquired multiple of 2.1 times annualized revenue. Marc Lou’s earlier 100-plus-deal dataset was even lower at 1.4 times. At those valuations, a small profitable SaaS can cost less than hiring a developer for several months.

The legal structure also suits small buyers. TrustMRR says its deals are handled as asset purchases. The buyer and seller agree on the assets being transferred, sign an APA, and use Escrow.com for the payment. Code, domains, accounts and other agreed assets can move to the new owner without the buyer necessarily acquiring the seller’s entire legal entity.

There is still real diligence involved. Marc Lou’s earlier dataset showed that completed acquisitions averaged 65 buyer-seller messages before closing. But someone buying a $5,000 SaaS can handle that process personally.

This is why TrustMRR can attract buyers who would never call themselves investors. For them, buying a startup competes with spending three months building one.

Are private-equity firms buying startups on TrustMRR?

Micro-PE buyers and acquisition entrepreneurs make sense on TrustMRR, but traditional private equity does not currently look like the main force behind its deals.

The basic economics explain most of it. A conventional fund has legal costs, employee time, diligence requirements and minimum return targets. Spending all of that effort on a $2,000 or $10,000 asset is hard to justify.

Small holding companies have a very different cost structure. One technical founder can inspect the code, understand the product, negotiate directly with the seller and operate the business afterward. A $20,000 acquisition can be meaningful to that buyer without needing to become a $100 million company.

Some TrustMRR listings are now large enough to interest more professional buyers, and the marketplace explicitly talks about strategic acquirers. We should expect that side to grow if deal sizes keep moving upward.

For now, though, the public acquisitions give us much more evidence of founders and small operators than of established PE firms.

Are founders starting to buy startups instead of building everything themselves?

Yes. TrustMRR is making “buy the next product” a realistic option for founders who previously would have built every new idea themselves.

Rafal Zawadzki is probably the clearest example because he could obviously build software. He had already built Supadata and worked as a developer and CTO. Yet when he found RemoveBG API, he decided that buying an existing product made more sense.

The economics are becoming hard to ignore. If a functioning SaaS can be acquired for a few thousand dollars, a founder has to compare that price with weeks of coding, design, setup, launch work and the risk that nobody uses the new product. The acquisition already comes with some combination of code, customers, market feedback and operating history.

AI coding tools push this further. A single technical founder can now maintain more software than a solo operator could realistically handle a few years ago. Owning several small products becomes less absurd when development and maintenance take less time.

TrustMRR is beginning to turn acquisition into another tool in the indie-hacker playbook, alongside building from scratch.

So who is buying startups on TrustMRR today?

TrustMRR startups are currently being bought mainly by founders, developers, small SaaS portfolio owners and industry operators who believe they can do more with an existing product than the current owner can.

The publicly disclosed buyers make that pattern unusually clear. We found an experienced e-commerce operator buying an e-commerce SaaS, a developer buying another SaaS, an API founder buying another API business, and a portfolio builder acquiring an AI software product. These buyers bring operating skills alongside the money.

The deal sizes reinforce the conclusion. Most people imagining startup M&A think in millions. TrustMRR’s latest weekly median was $2,250, while the live marketplace-wide figures imply roughly $6,400 per completed acquisition. As seen above, even businesses with negligible revenue are finding buyers.

That makes the typical TrustMRR acquisition accessible to a completely different class of acquirer. Someone with $5,000, technical skills and a growth idea can now behave like a tiny software holding company.

Professional investors will probably become more visible as the marketplace matures and larger businesses arrive. Today, though, TrustMRR’s buyer side still looks overwhelmingly founder-shaped.

The people buying indie hackers are, increasingly, other indie hackers.